I’m thinking of the fallacy of taking information about a subject you know little about at face value, even after you are aware that the source might be inaccurate.
To give an example: You, as a stockbroker, read a financial article in the paper and note inaccuracies in the story. However, the next article you read in the same paper is on a subject that you are not familiar with (such as the environment), and you proceed to accept all the information in the article as true.
The fallacy is pretty common (almost everyone does it), but it has proven a tough concept to google. If anyone can name it, I’d appreciate it.
It is not a fallacy, it is a cognitive bias. I could not find it in a few quick lists I googled. When I get home, I am happy to look it up in some of my books.
That’s because it is not a fallacy. It is not an error in reasoning to rely on a newspaper article, written for a general audience, in a subject matter where you have no expertise, even though you know that were to you read a similar article about a field in which you are knowledgeable, you would detect inaccuracies or generalizations.
It seems to me in such a situation you could only do one of two things: (1) take the claims at face value, or (2) randomly discount some of the claims, knowing that certain proportion of them will be inaccurate. You could not merely discount the inaccurate information, because, ex hypothesi you are not tutored in the subject matter at issue.
Do explain what, precisely, people should do in this situation. I know what your response is IRL, which is “Everybody should listen to ivn1188’s boring lectures on these topics and then instantly and unfailingly agree with me [ivn1188],” but I’d be curious to know your response to the board.
Yeah, a fallacy is an unsound argument of some description, i.e. one whose conclusion does not follow from its premises. What you’re describing is a species of intellectual laziness, certainly, but contains no premises or conclusions so isn’t really a fallacy per se.
If your putative stockbroker were to go out and argue that X is true because Y said so, then I agree with zamboniracer, it might be an appeal to authority. It’d depend on the content of the article, though - it may well just contain erroneous “facts”, in which case the argument could be sound but the premises false. For example, if I read that 100% of people who eat cabbage die of liver failure, and cite this to support a conclusion that cabbage is bad, that’s not an appeal to authority; I’ve just cited an untrue fact.
It’s not a fallacy, I’m fine with changing my request to “name this cognitive bias”. I’m not pitting anyone, nor suggesting that things be different, nor calling anyone out. I just want the name.
That would be cool.
BTW – it’s not intellectual laziness, per se. It’s more to do with the way people’s minds work, similar to the way people have trouble understanding remote risks or unknown probabilities, or how people respond to authority signals.
Oh yeah, I didn’t mean by describing it as intellectual laziness that we don’t all suffer from it to a degree. Ideally we’d all read everything with our best skeptic hats on, but we clearly don’t.
The question reminds me to an extent of one of my favourite bits of research, “Unskilled and unaware of it” (PDF), which studies people’s aptitude at judging their own competence at various tasks. While the headline result was that inept people tend to think they’re great, a somewhat surprising secondary observation was that competent people tend to underestimate their own abilities, ascribing more weight to the talents of others than they deserve. It’s quite a pronounced effect.
Im voting that this isnt a fallacy per se. Its just gullibility. This is simply the lack of skepticism. Perhaps with a little appeal to authority tossed in. Being an expert in one field should really open one’s eyes on how badly the press and self-promoters can be.
Lance Turbo (great porn name), that’s exactly what I am talking about. I’m sure it has a “real” name, but maybe not.
Horseloverfat – The book is actually pretty well reasoned and calls for more skepticism than is currently shown, which is not really the same as being irrational. His speeches that Lance Turbo linked to are worth reading even if you disagree.
But environmentalism aside, the point of these biases is that they are very subtle and not so much a thing to be derided as lazy thinking, as they are simply an effect of the way our brains work.
We have all kinds of heuristics to allow us to get along, but there are circumstances where our mental machinery breaks down and we get the wrong result. A real world example is the “CSI effect” – juries sometimes want DNA evidence or fancy forensics for run-of-the-mill burglaries, because their expectations have been set by TV shows, even though they know these shows arr, uh, generous with scientific liberties.
In this case, it’s just that people overestimate the factualism of a given source, even when they have information about how accurate the source is. It might be some function of ingrained deference to authority (Milgram, et al). It’s not really blameworthy, but is something to look out for.
What kind of fallacy/bias is the practice of searching out and using a label that noone obviously is familiar with. “Michael Crichton calls it the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.” :rolleyes:
Anyway… I think the problem is of thinking probabilistically about information. About reading an article, gaining something from it, but taking it with a grain of salt. Like Kimmy_Gibbler said… what is the stockbroker supposed to do? Disagree with random parts? Ignore the whole thing? Of course, he should incorporate all of it without drawing any conclusions and stash it away till he learns more about the issue and can integrate the sources against one-another. But that’s hard.
Why would a two different reports written by two different people on two separate topics be related in any so specific way that the incorrectness of one has anything to do with the other? Last I heard newspaper writers were not part of a company-wide hive mind, nor can you expect the reporting on every topic to be of equal quality. A newspaper might have some crack minds and particular interest in a particular area (like politics or sports or whatever) and be pretty second rate in another.
